Sarkozy calls for UN reform, blasts Copenhagen summit

French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday demanded reforms of the United Nations and urged negotiations under a small group of countries to accelerate efforts to fight climate change. Sarkozy, opening a one-day conference on deforestation, stood by the UN, saying there was "no alternative strategy" to a forum that gave all nations, rich and poor, a voice in a global arena. But he said changes to the UN were way overdue.
"The UN is absolutely indispensable and yet at the same time, it's not working," said Sarkozy. "(...) I am certain that we need to reform the United Nations, otherwise the United Nations will end up in an impasse."
Reiterating previous ideas, Sarkozy proposed overhauling the Security Council, widening the number of members and apportioning seats on a regional basis. But he reserved his main firepower for the flawed UN process on climate change. Sarkozy blasted the Copenhagen summit last December as "an example of bad management."
Two years of talks failed to yield a hoped-for treaty on tackling carbon emissions blamed for disrupting the climate system. More than 120 heads of state or government, arriving for the meeting's climax, were handed a draft text that Sarkozy likened to "volapuk," an invented 19th-century language translatable as "gobbledegook."
With fiasco looming, around two dozen countries haggled through the final night to craft a compromise and submitted it to the wider arena as a platform for action. The so-called Copenhagen Accord would limit warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) but does not detail when or how this goal should be achieved nor commit signatories to binding pledges.
Sarkozy admitted the outcome was "frustrating" but argued that the rapid progress yielded by a small group in the space of a few concentrated hours was revealing. It was time to ditch the format by which all issues are negotiated simultaneously by all countries under the 192-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), where unanimous approval is essential, Sarkozy said.